Business

Facebook disputes allegations by a growing chorus of users that it is deliberately suppressing posts to milk them for ad money and billionaire Mark Cuban, who is fed up with what he sees as the increasing the pay-for-play nature of the social network.

"The big negative for Facebook is that we will no longer push for likes or subscribers because we can't reach them all. Why would we invest in extending our Facebook audience size if we have to pay to reach them? That's crazy," Cuban told ReadWrite. While Cuban doesn't allege that Facebook is deliberately suppressing posts, his criticism comes as many others are making that claim.

However, a third-party report claims that posts by Pages with more than 1 million fans reach about one-third the number of fans, on average, that a Page with 1,000 to 10,000 fans does.

The key stat in Facebook's defense: The average Facebook status update reached 16% of users in October, the same figure the company quoted in comScore's Power of Like white paper in July 2011. Facebook at the time said the stat referred to status updates by brands that post five out of seven days. The average status update by a user, meanwhile, reaches 12% of her friends.

Unfortunately, there are a dearth of third parties to verify Facebook's self-reported figure. One exception is PageLever, which has looked at Facebook's Pages before and after the company tweaked its EdgeRank algorithm in September. The company analyzed more than 700 Pages with 100,000-plus fans from July 1 through Oct. 14 and found that the average reach per Page hadn't budged.

Note that the standard of deviation did rise in mid September. This can be explained by Facebook's crackdown on spam. Facebook claims its September tweak was devised to target inappropriate messages. PageLever's research also found that complaints of spam fell after September:

A spam crackdown would explain why some are experiencing less pickup per post, but it wouldn't clarify why George Takei is claiming the same and Mark Cuban is fed up with Facebook. However, it should be noted that Takei, who has close to 3 million fans, claimed his reach fell back in the spring, well before the company tweaked EdgeRank. For Takei, the shrinking reach (he claimed his general reach fell 25%, though he was not specific about the time period) and the introduction of Facebook's Promoted Post ad unit in February was too coincidental. "I asked myself, is Facebook doing something to shrink my fan reach, at the same time it is telling me to pay to reach more of them?" Takei said at the time.

Meanwhile, Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, told ReadWrite this week that he's no longer making Facebook the primary site for the Mavs— and 70 other of his companies. Cuban was particularly irate that Facebook wanted him to pay $3,000 for a Promoted Post to reach 1 million fans.

While Takei is hardly the only one alleging a Facebook shakedown, such complaints are hard to prove. Individual Pages may have a smaller reach than in the past, but there are various factors considered by EdgeRank, including the post's engagability and competition in the News Feed with other posts, that might cause a shortfall. Turning again to PageLever, we find that one issue is that the larger the Page's audience, the smaller its reach:

It's not clear why larger Pages have a smaller reach. However, it's apparent that big brands are getting almost two thirds less reach than the average Facebook user, according to PageRank. Such data will do little to defuse claims of a conspiracy against big advertisers even if Facebook claims nothing has changed.

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